“I believed in your symphony… I saw the forces of evil and good wrestling with each other; I saw a man in torment struggling toward inward harmony.” -Arnold Schönberg, in a letter to Mahler
In a frenzied heat during the summer of 1906, he scratched out all 216 pages of the Eighth Symphony in what his wife called “a single burst.” God flowed through his pen:
I have just finished my Eighth—it is the greatest thing I have done thus far, and so strange in its form and content that it is impossible to write about it. Imagine that the universe begins to ring and resound, no longer with human voices but with revolving planets and suns.
Caught between romanticism and modernism, Gustav Mahler’s career was more than just dramatic; it was also wrought with contradictions. He waffled between musical trends, writing his first four symphonies in the vogue “programmatic” style, only to “Damn all programs!” and write the next three purely aesthetically (or “absolutely”). Leonard Bernstein noted that “In the work of every composer, we see shifts between one idiom and its opposite, but nowhere are these shifts as extreme and violent as with Mahler.” Adolf Weissmann summed up the whole dilemma of Mahler’s music when he described it as “program music without a program.”
“In the work of every composer, we see shifts between one idiom and its opposite, but nowhere are these shifts as extreme and violent as with Mahler.” -Leonard Bernstein
His compositional output seems to reflect his personality, which was similarly undecided. He oscillated from “fundamentally kind, and as helpful as a child” to “terroristically contentious,” according to composer Wilhelm Kienzl. Mahler was equally mercurial in his marriage. Although a doleful romantic at times, Mahler’s “self-centered and narcissistic behaviour bordered on the pathological,” Ilari Colli writes.
The Eighth Symphony, with its polarized structure and nebulous narrative, is all of Mahler. In two movements, he broadcasts a musical dyad, drawing inspiration first from the sonata and subsequently from the cantata form (the Italian words “sonata” and “cantata” mean “played” and “sung,” and were applied to distinguish between the two divergent musical styles) while singing a millennium of literature, first in Latin and then in German. The so-called “Symphony of 1000,” for orchestra and chorus, is the fullest expression we have of the double man.
Nézet-Séguin’s monolithic account reminds us why the Philadelphians were the ones to deliver the American premiere a century ago. Indeed, the very idea of 1000 musicians performing one piece of music is borderline oxymoronic. Conductor Leopold Stokowsky witnessed the European premiere of Mahler’s Eighth in 1910, and immediately heard an opportunity to showcase the “Philadelphia Sound,” an effect created by consistently doubling woodwind and brass parts for a “wall of sound”-esque impression. In a word, it is big. The Philadelphia Orchestra, more than any other ensemble, knows how to create unity out of diversity.
Nézet-Séguin’s monolithic account reminds us why the Philadelphians were the ones to deliver the American premiere a century ago.
Mahler, a full-time conductor himself, believed that “the true art of conducting is in transitions,” and Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s artistic mastery is on display in this recording. In Part 1, sections of the 400+ ensemble shift into and out of focus with well-rehearsed precision. Evocative of a motet — in which multiple voices whir along at their own pace and with their own words — the first movement nevertheless sings through as a single, clarion prayer. Concertmaster David Kim’s solo work is knife-like in its agony. Despite the frequent changes in meter, Nézet-Séguin manages a bright, highly classical account, ending with a gasp as we hold our breath until the second movement.
Nézet-Séguin uses a broader brush in Part 2, washing waves of color from one side of the stage to the other. Depth and space become more apparent, as does the super-orchestra’s collective breath. The text for the first movement comes from the Gregorian hymn “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” a plea for redemption through God. This time, Mahler sets to music the ending of Goethe’s Faust — a tragic play about human love written in German 1000 years later. The musical challenge, as with other aspects of the symphony, is to organically unify the two halves. Regarding God and love, the Orchestra doubles down on Mahler’s thesis: they are one.
When the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered Mahler’s Eighth Symphony in 1916, Europe was splintering. Austria-Hungary, where Mahler was born into a Jewish family in Bohemia, had fallen. Composers of the late-Romantic period had for years used their spotlights to forward nationalist ideas, helping Europe along the path to war. Richard Wagner, one of Mahler’s musical idols, was an ignominious antisemite and proto-Nazi who used his operas to stoke the flames of German nationalism.
More than just an expression of his psyche, demanding that 1000 musicians perform together, in different languages and in various styles, as small parts of one mammoth piece, was Mahler’s defiance. This choate performance, recorded in 2016 and released in 2020, is Yannick’s.